German Car Zone

I just confirmed with two dealers that Options P2 and P3 and Distronic Plus are all delayed until at least the April allocations. There were some car produced and sold with these options before the supply ran out. Apparently these delays are due to vendors not meeting schedules. Dieter must be pulling out what hair he has left...

This means that orders with deposits placed months ago are sitting and new orders will just create a bigger backlog. I have decided to just put off any order until May or so and see what the picture looks like. Perhaps there will be some news on the S450 model by that time and I can save some money.

i know night vision is out of stock until july...!! mr zetsche cant do much about it...the suppliers need to pick up their performance also obviously....

That's a lot worse than April or May. However, I bet Mr Zetsche will do something about it. We may not hear about it or see it but you can bet he is steaming!

This car has been for sale in Europe for several months and then in Detroit they show this technical marvel and their press releases talk about the advanced night vision and rear parking camera and Distronic Plus. Now you can have one of these fine cars but you can't have it equipped with any of these innovations. No excuse for such a situation.

See this is what I was talking about.

Anyway, I really do think you should wait Jack.
You know first cars will always have problems and it will probably take MB some time to take care of them.

well may be more people chose these options than expected....you could say the same about xbox 360's, half the accessories are still unavailble

Exactly! What a load of rubbish on MB's part.

What i don't understand is what the big deal is about MB's reversing camera. Sure it superimposes the direction of the vehicle onto the screen, but hey so does the rear view camera on the new Lexus IS. A car that is infinitely cheaper than the S with no supply issues for the technical gizmos.

MB was very late to the party with the rear view cameras, and still it’s only 'available' on the S. Not even the gargantuan M and R-class.

Now the new LS460 is said to park itself...impressive indeed.

Well Lexus is a lot smaller than MB, and is only an important player in just a few markets in witch iy's really focused. Now D. Zetsche stressed some of the problems in a "Der Spiegel" interview. Basicaly said that amongs other problems, MB is late to the party, in several areas.
Now you are complaining about the S klasse option, but over here it takes an almost divine miracle to find a Lexus dealership and another almost divine miracle buy any Lexus that doesn't start with RX.

Lexus future is looking extremely bright here in Australia. The new IS is priced to kill, and an excellent vehicle to boot. Shame about the RX thing being true though. I drove one on the weekend and it was TERRIBLE. Much more than a generation behind the ML and X5 dynamically. It truly was horrible.

That being said I can bet that with this new generation of Lexus being rolled out, the brand is going to be clashing with the German titans globally within 5-10 years. I really believe Lexus are going to be a force to be reckoned with. Good luck to the Germans. MB in particular will need it.

5-10 won't be enough even if the germans will have the same sales as today = 0% growth.
Both BMW, MB and Audi outsell Lexus at least 2 to 1. now take out the USA sales and the figure will grow significantly.

well actually come to think of it april....2 months from now....is not that bad is it...as if you order a new mercedes you normally end up waiting about 3 months anyway eh?